On Native Ground, and: The Bee Woman, and: Family Reunion, and: Myles Horton Tells The Brier Story, and: The Brier Plans a Mountain Vision Center

^= On Native Ground =J2^_ This wind is blowing me all time's weathers, mingling near and far, pennyrile and woodsmoke, crow's call and carrion. In a jay's harangue saws are singing; the swung ax flashes in a lifting wave;4 twanging still in a white-faced hornet's whine a barbed-wire fence caught in a cuffonce crossing. Seed fallen in flesh rich as woodsdirt, gone days spring up, trees from sown sweat. Now is this green tree's growing bark, this always was and is and forever tree-shading summer was and is and summer will be. A waterbead quivers on my hand: there is a way to enter. Underfoot a mole's nightwork gives way—O doors are everywhere: the spring at the mountain's foot holds the running taste ofchildhood, the barking fox blurts the mountain's riddle. Transparent minnows hanging in green water: windows onto sunken summer days. I enter through a fish's eye to one vast room glowing in cold light. Out of an oilspill on a rainslick road campfires ofa hundred hunts are blazing. A dog's eye caught in headlights on a turn: rose windows warm in his cathedral skull. I travel everywhere on native ground; roads turning into darkness turn me home, plunge me into cool air ofthe mountains. Gray marble monuments bending in a graveyard, \(Q skewed reflections swaying on rolled water, VH 37 straighten to still gray chestnut stumps, a chimney stack among old trees and roses sprawling over tumbled corner stones sprouting second growth. A new house rises. Life grows in rings around a hurt, a tree with barbed wire running through its heart. The Bee Woman She carried the eggs in her straw hat and never reached into a nest with her bare hand. A woman who could conjure warts, who knew charms for drawing fire, spells to make butter come, and mysteries ofbees and hummingbirds, besides, knew to roll eggs from a guinea's nest with a gooseneck hoe. There is a mountain cove and light is leaving. Speckled guineas fly to roose in trees, their potterick and screech drifts far away, becomes the faintest peeping in my dream ofstifling afternoons when we would stand, the old woman and I, by fencerows and cowtrails listening for half-wild guineas screeching as they came off nests they'd stolen away in thickets, briers, scrub pines, and chinquapins. And no matter where I wake—horn's beep, ship's bells, clatter ofgarbage cans, strange tongues spoken on the street below, in a rising falling bunk out at sea,— everywhere I stand on native ground. The bee woman may pass through my dream: running under a cloud ofswarming bees, she beats an empty pie pan with a spoon till the swarm settles, black on a drooping pine bough and guineas regroup pottericking—all moving toward waking's waterfall. Family Reunion Sunlight glints off the chrome of many cars. Cousins chatter like a flock ofguineas. 38 In the shade ofoaks and maples six tables stand filled with good things to eat. Only the jars oficed tea sweat. Here the living and dead mingle like sun and shadow under old trees. For the dead have come too, those dark, stern departed who pose all year in oval picture frames. They are looking out ofthe eyes ofchildren, young sprouts whose laughter blooms fresh as the new flowers in the graveyard. Myles Horton Tells The Brier Story When Bill Moyers came to Highlander Center and interviewed Myles Horton for his Journal (Adventures ofa Radical Hillbilly—in two parts), Myles had to be made up for the cameras. Moyers had hired a local make-up girl, and while she worked, Horton told Moyers all about the history ofthe mountains, where the people came from, all they'd been through, how Appalachia for a hundred years had been the country's guinea pig. Later, when just the two ofthem were together, the make-up girl blurted out to Myles (it turned out she was from up around Lafollette, or Jellico, Tennessee—in that area), just blurted out, and she was close to tears: "That was wonderful—wonderful what you told Some ofthose...